


i'm just a crosshair

by Anonymous



Category: Dream SMP Roleplay, Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative, Technoblade-centric (Video Blogging RPF), freud is a little bitch tho just to be clear, i simply enjoy a deep-dive character study, in the dream smp roleplay universe - not rpf to be clear, in which i may parallel techno's politics with some deep and vaguely freudian insecurities, vine voice i can't believe i've done this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-12 07:40:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29631294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: While the other children did normal, well-adjusted things – made friends, climbed trees, chittered around dinner tables and chased each other down the cobbled streets – Techno studied the blade.Which is a kinder way of saying he was desperately lonely.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 63
Collections: Anonymous





	i'm just a crosshair

While the other children did normal, well-adjusted things – made friends, climbed trees, chittered around dinner tables and chased each other down cobbled streets – Techno studied the blade. Which is a kinder way of saying he was desperately lonely.

The sword was a gift. Dull, strong-cast steel and a comfortable leather handgrip. Sensible as a mother. And, oh, she’d shone prouder than the sun the day he first held it. Slotting _just so_ in his clenched fists.

That day, he imagined he looked as his mother did those times she came in from the night, sweat-drenched and tracking dark, sticky footprints on the threshold. His father always cleaned up quick-smart and shuffled Techno off to bed, but not before he caught a quick glimpse.

She looked – radiant.

Techno had waited, and waited, and waited for this day, and when it came? He was happy. Maybe for the last time.

You don’t need to know how his parents died. Oh, you might _think_ you do, you might protest – _this is the hero’s journey_! How are you to truly comprehend the Blade’s becoming without this crucial detail?

You are mistaken. The _how_ doesn’t matter – it never does, and you’ll learn this. What matters is: it happened. And the hero’s journey is for myths, folklore and fairy tales. Techno’s read enough of them to know.

Besides – don’t you know a tragedy, when you see it?

He ran. He packed supplies, of course – food, rough-knit clothing. Nothing extravagant or sentimental. The sword didn’t count. The sword was a mere item. An object of study.

Techno wasn’t unique, he knew this. At least not in the obvious ways. There were others who, whether by choice or birth or circumstance, became versed in the ways of combat from a young age. On the odd occasion Techno passed through a village, he would find them, and watch them. Gaggles of scraggly teenagers fighting together with wooden sticks, loosing blunted arrows at targets. The key word here being: _together_.

These children trained, but Techno studied. He travelled by land and by sea, and as he walked and sailed and ran he had ample time to build himself, and to refine his natural edges down to the sharpest of points. How the sword weighed in his hand, how it swam as a wave through the air. Exactly how the grip felt when his palm stung with sweat, or rain, or blood. The sounds – the _swoosh_ es and _thunk_ s and that sickening crunch of a ribcage as it caves in. He learned it all.

He had the world, and time, enough. And there were things that lurked in the night and they, at least, you could fight with your fists. And your sword.

The first time he encountered a zombie, he thought: _oh_.

He got it, now.

It walked like a sleeping man, not a dead one. Dragging its feet like two broken limbs, groaning as if to express the height of its discontent – as if to warn all those within earshot what could become of them. This perversion of humanity.

Well, Techno wasn’t afraid. He fluttered his fingers around the grip of his sword and forced himself slowly, slowly, to sheath the weapon. It might have taken decades, eons as he took one step back for every step the zombie took towards him, but finally the blade slid back into its sheath with an audible _shing_.

The zombie started, snorting like a stuck pig. It seemed to smile with gummy, broken lips, before forming them into a shape like words. Making a sound from the back of its throat that could have been barely human.

Oh.

This was a _person_.

There flashed one last thought before Techno ran – he wondered how it happened. Wondered if sometimes it was not a bite or a scratch from an infected monster, but isolation, neglect that did it. Whether what made a zombie was nothing, nothing at all.

If you’re a little different – stop there. It’s never a good idea.

Even _before_ , when he had at least his parents to tie him down to earth...well. Loneliness isn’t something you just grow into; it’s a state of being, a state of mind. The state of nature. Lonely then, and now, and you might ask: how could he even know the difference? Does a man fear fire if he’s never seen the sea?

…Yes. Obviously.

The other children – they were your common or garden variety, as a rule. Bothering adults, milking cows, playing clap games. That sort of thing.

But Techno…it’s hard to describe. The difference, that is. Its intangibility. Not something that could be labelled, or diagnosed. It evaded all attempts to isolate it, to study or even eliminate it. It simply _was_ : that foggy, enduring sense of being just a half-step out of line, and rooted to the ground.

And – _after_ – that was when he began to wonder…where was the value in it all? What could be gained from family, community, from bonds and ties and borders? It was arbitrary. It was unnatural.

He didn’t belong. And over time – and this was a fact he noted without boast, without arrogance, and with little pride – he became the best.

Let this be a lesson to all.

When he was little, there was Wilbur. And one day, there was a masquerade.

This was before, of course. At the time he had parents to encourage him along, loath as he was to attend. At least, he imagined he was reluctant. It was hard to tell, at that point, whether his isolation was prison or paradise. Either way, it was self-imposed, and Wilbur managed, once or twice, to break through.

"You have to wear a mask," Wilbur had said. "So nobody knows who you are."

And that sounded more than a little appealing — like being alone in a crowd. Or, the opposite: being together, being a part of something. A little like being somebody else.

He thought long and hard. He searched his parents’ wardrobe, the whole house. The outskirts of the woods in the daylight. Inspiration! He had to find it. Something that was him. Something that fit. Something that might feel like it belonged…

His father helped with the arts and crafts, his mother with the self-confidence. But, true to form, the night came and the town lost itself in music and lights and strange, masked dancers, and Techno walked into the hall and everything stopped.

That was the first and last time that Techno froze in fear.

It was Wilbur who shuffled him out with a skinny arm around his shoulder, blocking out the wide-eyed faces and judgmental mutterings. It was Techno who asked, in the safety out where the night was deep and quiet, “What did I do?” 

Wilbur’s hand slipped off Techno’s shoulder. He frowned beneath his mask – a sequined bottle-green affair, tasteful, the opposite of monstrous. “They thought you were – um.”

Techno’s stomach turned as he remembered the hush that had overcome the revelry so suddenly upon his appearance. His family lived next to the butcher in those days, and it reminded him of that – the bottomless silence, after the chickens had stopped screaming. “What?”

“You know.” Wilbur seemed to struggle with something, wringing his hands. “You look like a – a piglin. A monster. I guess.”

“I wasn’t – “ Techno started to argue.

“Yeah, I know – “

“- and _so what_?”

Then Wilbur’s slash-mouth twitched into a smile. Weak, but kind, and it took Techno a long while later to understand what that look meant. Because that was the end of the conversation, and a week later it was the end of Techno’s parents and the life he knew, and of course that meant the end of him and Wilbur, too.

Maybe the tusks were too long. Or the eyes too far apart. His hair was too long and tangled, or he was too tall, too much, too altogether different. But somewhere, somehow, Techno knew that if Wilbur had put on that same mask, the music would never have stopped. The dancers would have spun on. Wilbur would have caught a smile from the girl in the corner and some claps on the back from the other boys.

No matter. Anyway, it was high time Techno learned that lesson: sometimes, the problem is you.

Eventually, there was another time. Another place.

Another sword, too, long after he outgrew the last. It took destruction for him to let that sword go – shattered, crushed between coal-black fists. That enderman fell beneath Techno’s own fists, one punch and thrust and twist after another ‘til his knuckles bled and he fell to his knees. All the better to hear its dying screams and their echo like a _coo-ee_ across the valley, right inside his ear.

He forged another weapon. Stronger, longer, better. He thought about saying goodbye to his old blade, but then reminded himself – stronger, longer, better. It was never just about the sword.

So, all new things. New people, lands. A mighty government. He broke his back beneath the sky and toiled beneath the earth and fought all manner of beasts – he went to hell and back, no less. But always there was this: a dull melancholy, that flatlining brand of rage. And misdirection, misdirection, misdirection.

The point was: the government had to die. The country, too. Any and all attempts at inflicting structure on the state of nature – the hat would never fit, they had to learn! Community, togetherness, rules and order…these were all shots in the dark, and the dark _wanted_.

The point was: if Techno couldn't have it, nobody should.

The irony: it was in proving that point that Techno found some approximation of friendship. However briefly.

Dream was...a sometime thing.

He did things a friend might do, and took risks for Techno that even family might not take. He was odd. Techno was odd, too. There was something – a mismatched, maybe-something. Sometimes. A little.

There was Wilbur, and that was not new. But it was there and it wasn’t bad, per say. Mostly strange. Mostly, they talked about nothing of consequence – not of the time nor events that had passed between them, hardening their stares and tugging their spines upright. But they joked, and laughed, and that was almost the same thing.

Tommy was most unexpected. There was that one time – in the vault, when Techno had felt _valuable_ and that wasn’t belonging but it was close, it was something – when Tommy asked, loud and incredulous, " _Where did you find the time?_ "

"Well," said Techno, "I don’t have many friends."

"You don’t say?”

"Also, sleep is for the weak."

"Amen. But remind me to take you out somewhere, sometime. There's more to life, you know?"

"Take me out...like, mortally?"

Tommy laughed, great and cackling, and his whole body shook. Techno tried to remember the last time he might have laughed like that, as if joy were an instinct.

"You're a real funny guy, Techno man,” Tommy said. “No, of course not. I mean, like, for food. All of us, we’ll go. When we’ve won."

And that was that. Barely anything, but Techno lost it anyway – blew it up. Broke it between his hands just to watch it bleed, just to feel heat and gristle in the lines of his palms. Why not savour one’s own just deserts? At the end of the day – _why the hell not_.

Techno never really lost Dream, at least.

He never really had him, either.

Techno knew a lot of things. Many of them he even knew well – blood, sweat, combat. But also the things he kept tight to himself: the stillness of a lake with nobody around for miles, not even fish to break the mirrored water. And his mother’s stories of far-off heroes, his father making shadow puppets of gods and mortals and minotaurs.

Here was another thing he knew: _when to go_.

The cabin out there was peaceful. Not quiet – never quiet – but at least the ground never shook, the sky never fell, and the snow was pure and white as a dove.

Unfortunately, there was another lesson. One Techno had yet to learn. It was a lesson and a story, as all good lessons are, and not only that – it was all the stories.

Techno took that first step out of his cabin and he was Atlas beneath the world. He hefted his sword onto his shoulder as Prometheus revived himself, day after day under the sun. The three sisters watched as he drew back his bow and loosed and loosed again, and when he unleashed Pandora's box to ravage and scorch the earth, oh, the Fates cut cords like tendons. Sweat and blood and ichor was as wax – drip-dripping down Icarus’ back. And everybody knows that Orpheus turned around, of course he did, because this is the lesson:

The tide turns. The wine spoils. The voices called and Techno itched, ached to take his due – it all comes out in the end, like a stain, like a moonrise. Deep red, red. 

You want to know the worst part? Here it is. A good tragedy is something you can spot many miles away, blunt and conspicuous as a mountain. And Techno was never anything but this: a blight upon the landscape.

Yeah, he’d do it all again.

**Author's Note:**

> what else is there to do in the 2021 great depression + plague but get way too into a minecraft smp roleplay character
> 
> i mean i only got into all this, like, yesterday, so go easy on me if i've got some smp lore wrong. also, i made up a bunch of stuff anyway, because fiction. 
> 
> would mean the world to me if you left a lil comment - im not familiar with this fandom at all and would love to hear from you <3


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